Liveblogging David Harvey’s lectures on Marx/Capital:
*Capital* is richly referential to Greeks, Shakespeare, Goethe, and the novels of Balzac. After several years of reading Capital yearly, Harvey read Balzac and said, Aha! This is where Marx gets his idea about that.
An English major of little brain, in other words, may possibly approach this Everest — my theory being the 20th century and its wars interrupted our study of Marx, fascist backlash being the 20th century’s perfect demo of Marx’ dialectic thesis/antithesis/synthesis — of world thought with, you know, some tiny vestigial bit of a crampon. Balzac as my crampons? Shit.

Liveblogging Harvey on Marx: Marx invented a critical theory, here:https://genius.com/Robert-c-tucker-the-marx-engels-reader-c…
The essence of which is revolutionary fire can be made only by rubbing together conceptual blocs of theory. The three conceptual blocs of theory in *Capital* are 18th and 19th century ideas of [mainly English] political economy [Theories of Surplus Value], German classical political philosophy [Kant, Hegel, Leibniz, Spinoza, deconstruction of political econ theory] extending back to the Greeks [Marx diss, on Epicurus!], Utopian socialist tradition [primarily French, 1830s Acarians, Proudhon, Saint Simon, Fourier, Cabet] — Marx wants to make this project scientific, and must reconfigure what scientific method is all about.
He was thinking about the revolution of 1848, and by critiquing Malthus and negating Fourier, pretty much without citing them, makes great use of thinkers he believed got revolution wrong, or unscientifically. Thus acknowledging the great principle, I would argue of polemic — negative example is a great teacher.
Rootless cosmopolitan indeed. This is what you call a Big Sexy Brain.

Liveblogging David Harvey’s lectures on Marx/Capital.
Marx says his method of inquiry is different from his method of presentation, which makes the first three chapters of *Capital* a notoriously difficult read. When a French publisher suggested serializing *Capital* chapter by chapter in a newspaper, Marx thought it was a great idea as the working class would have it more easily available to them. But he worried that the practical French, seeking application to current events immediately, would be put off by the dichotomy between inquiry and presentation. He starts with his conclusions, about the essential theory and nature of the commodity. How this works in the “real” world doesn’t become *actually* clear until the end of the book. Harvey makes the interesting point that Marx is thus a pioneer of the Freudian method of starting with the surface world of symptoms or appearances, penetrating to the heart of the onion to find out how and why it grows, and then returning the surface world in which you say, ah yes, here are the symptoms, but the real cause is something else. As the result of his deep dive method, Marx starts with the something else, which makes his first three chapters almost impenetrable.#TravelsWithUncleKarlie#resist#fascistaesthetics

Liveblogging David Harvey’s lectures on *Capital*:

The three published volumes represent about one eighth of Marx’ planned project, as outlined by Marx in this preparatory essay:

People eager to get to the parts about class struggle or financial crises will have to wait, as volume one is about the mode of production from the standpoint of production (not the market, not global trade), volume two, from the perspective of exchange, volume three, crisis formation, rules of distribution, interest, rent, taxes.

Because the first chapters of *Capital* lay out the conceptual apparatus for the entire work, most of it unwritten, they can be difficult reading. Harvey suggests trying a little Hegel, even more difficult, to dull your pain.

Then comes the other part of the method, important both to method of presentation and method of inquiry: Marx’s dialectic.

#resist#fascistaesthetics#TravelsWithUncleKarlie

Liveblogging David Harveys lectures on Marx’ *Capital*, Volume 1, Lecture 1.
CAUTION: A great deal of this is direct quotes from David Harvey’s copyrighted lectures. Don’t cite it without attribution *for the words* to Harvey.
Marx’s use of dialectic — in dialectic we find a different concept of analysis. Harvey says there’s hardly any causal language in Marx — he doesn’t say this causes that. He says, rather, this is dialectically related to that. A dialectic relation is an inner relation, not a causal relation. Marx claims his dialectic is different from Hegel’s, and opposite to it. He had deconstructed Hegel previous to writing *Capital*, here:https://www.marxists.org/…/Marx_Critique_of_Hegels_Philosop…
Marx objects to what he calls the “mysticatory” aspect of Hegel’s philosophy, which had become fashionable in Germany. Marx not only opposed Hegel’s dialectic, he revolutionized the dialectical method. He had to reconfigure it so every historical event was seen to be in motion as well as transient — “all that is solid melts into air.” (I have always felt this to be what I think of as Marx’ raptus, the extraordinarily romantic and sensual Germanic gotterdamerung thing. That capitalism itself is seen to be the engine of this energy is remarkable and worth at least one lifetime’s thought and study.) What this new dialectic means is Marx will establish relations between things while maintaining his enormous respect for the fluidity and dynamics of capitalism.
Marx never wrote a treatise on his dialectic — to understand that it’s not static, as so many interpret “Marx” to be — you have to read *Capital*, in which he demonstrates his dialectic of fluidity.
Dialectic method is contradictory. Children do it naturally and we train them out of it, training them to be “rational”.
For Marx, everything is in motion [and this is a foundational definition of modernity, cloned with quantum physics, of which the former notion Marx is a founding father]. He doesn’t talk about labor, he talks about the labor process. Capital is not a thing. It is a process. It is in motion. Value does not exist unless it is in motion. So some of Marx’ concepts are about relations, transformative activity [raptus! rising to Valhalla from a ring of fire!]
This is like this at this moment, and like that the next moment. Another reason the first three chapters of *Capital* are very difficult. He wants us to understand how motion is instantiated within the capitalist mode of production.
Analytical Marxists, the no bullshit Marxists, as they call themselves, say all this dialectic is bullshit. Positivists ttry to turn it into a mathematical model. But if you’re to understand Marx on Marx’s terms, and not the billion reams of Talmudic dispute, you will grapple with his dialectic, and not theirs. (Good one, Harvey. Keep the amateurs out.)
David Harvey says he’s been teaching this class for 30 years, and every year he learns something new from the text. Marx said ideas have to change as circumstances do, and Harvey, who denies being a Marxist, has used Marx’ dialectic in his own work as idea in his own field of sociology have changed. (This is an idea of the utilitarian philosopher William James: our ideas of what God is change as our needs change.)
Says Harvey, “This text is a wonderful, wonderful exercise in seeking to understand that which is almost impossible to understand.” Thus each student must develop her own lifelong dialog with the text.

These are lecture notes, often not paraphrased, a mix of direct quotes from Harvey’s copyrighted lectures, and the Penguin Classics trans of Capital. I have not put quotes or attributions around any direct quote. So if you want to cite these notes, you’d better listen to Harvey’s lecture and read the Penguin translation for correct and honest attribution.

Harvey emphasizes the extraordinary content of Capital as drawing on the canons of literature, political philosophy and political economy. He says its value, in 40 years of reading it annually, is in its power to say something new every year, and in its heroic method, an attempt to understand something which may be impossible to understand.

Commodity is the a priori beginning point of chapter 1, volume 1, Capital.

Marx begins by saying wealth in societies employing capital methods of production “appears” as a collection of commodities.

Harvey says always watch out when Marx says “appears”.

Let the games begin.

He also makes clear he’s interested only in capitalist modes of production, not ancient ones, or socialist ones.

It’s a genius beginning point because everybody has had an experience of a commodity. All genders, ethnicities, religions participate in this economic transaction.

A commodity is something which meets a human want or need.

He says he’s not interested in the motives behind the purchase of commodities, the systems invented to measure them or their diversity.

First big concept, use value: the usefulness of a thing.

As a social scientist, Marx says he can’t go into a lab, isolate things, and do an experiment. What he must do to isolate things is use the power of abstraction — and he cuts right to the chase, liberating commodity of history, sociology, political economy by abstracting it immediately.

In a capitalist society, commodities are also the material bearers of exchange value. Please note, a bearer is not the thing itself: commodities are not exchange value, but its bearers. What we see in the world of exchange processes, geogrpahically, temporally, there’s an enormous realm of market exchange, different ratios occuring between shirts and shoes, we see different quantitative relations between bushels of wheat and tons of steel and pairs of shoes and shirts — at first sight, what we see in the world of exchange are values which are incoherent, all over the place. Marx says exchange value appears to be accidental and purely relative (this I pondered age four or five, and I think many children do. Children, Harvey says, are natural dialecticians until we retrain them to be “rational”). Therefore instrinsic value — a value connected to something inherent in the commodity — seems a contradiction in terms.

Everything in this world of exchange is, in principle, exchangeable with everything else. The implication being that the commodity you just received in exchange for something else, can be exchanged for something else. A thing keeps moving, and can be exchanged for all the other commodities at some point.

It follows then, writes Marx, that the valid exchange values of a particular commodity express something equal, and secondly, exchange value cannot be anything other than the mode of expression, the form of appearance of a content distinguishable from it. When I look at a commodity, I cannot discern what gives it value. I can only ascertain its value when it is exchanged, or it motion. It only has value in motion. As it moves, its expressing something about exchangeability — a commensurability in exchange. It means that all things are commensurable in exchange. (Can you see the moral/ethical beginnings here of secular humanism, of which Marx is probably the main progenitor?)

Why are they commensurable and where does commensurability come from? The commodity is the bearer of that something.

#fascistaesthetics#resist#TravelsWithUncleKarlie

Liveblogging Harvey’s lecture 1 on Marx’ *Capital*.
CAUTION: Do not quote these lecture notes, which are basically direct quotes, unattributed, from either Marx or Harvey’s copyrighted lectures. Go to Marx or the lectures to find out where to put your quotation marks.

Commensurability — everything is in principle immediately exchangeable with everything else. A thing keeps on moving. As it moves, a commodity expresses something about exchangeability. Why, and what is this commensurability made up of? Where does it come from? How is it defined? The commodity is the bearer of that something, which is not inherent in the commodity itself, but borne by the commodity, a relation inside the commodity. Each commodity, as far as its exchange value, must be reducible to this third thing. It is not a physical quality. Here, says Harvey, we see the fallacy in calling Marx a grubby materialist.
As use values, Marx writes, commodities differ above all in quality. As exchange values, they can only differ in quantity, and therefore do not contain an atom of use value. Commensurability is not constituted out of the utility of something. If we disregard the use value of commodities, only one property remains — there are all properties of human labor. That is what commodities have in common. What exchange and use values commodities bear are the products of human labor.
What kind of labor is it? Human labor in the abstract, not variable rates of labor whereby you exchange more of your labor for the same shirt it took a lazy worker 15 days to make, than you exchange for a shirt a fast worker made in three days. Abstract.
In four pages (Penguin Classic) Marx has laid out three fundament values: Use value, exchange value, value. Value is what is passed on in the process of commodity exchange. Value is what makes all commodities in principle exchangeable with each other. Exchange value is a necessary form of expression, or form of appearance, of value. “Appearance”. There is something mysterious about the exchange of all those commodities, the way all those commodities could be commensurable with one another. The mystery is that they’re values, but they’re represented now by exchange values, what I can get for it in the market, is a representation of value, and a representation of labor.
At the supermarket, you can’t see the labor in a commodity even though it has an exchange value.
To say something is a representation of something is not to say it is something. Marx will spend a great deal of time talking about the gap between value and its representation. Something has use value only because abstract human labor is objectified, or materialized in it, says Marx. A process — a labor process — becomes objectified in a thing. This idea is very important in Marx. What is the relation between the process and the thing? Marx returns to this question many times.
The thing is a representation of the process.
Value is always in motion.
That means that a process is objectified in a thing. It’s the thing that’s sold in the market, and not the process — the pot is sold in the market, and not the potter’s process of making. The process must be objectified into a thing or commodity. (Incarnation! Yeah, baby.) Inside of that thing, the quantity is measured by the duration of the labor, which itself has measures — hours, days, etc. There’s a coded message here in which the capitalist mode of productions sets up a certain system of temporality. How does the capitalist mode of production structure time?

“They [values] can no longer be distinguished,” writes Marx, “but are all together reduced to the same kind of labor, human labor in the abstract….Let us now look at the residue of the products of labor. There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity.”
Here, Harvey points, out, we get the first hint of Marx’s love of Shelley, Frankenstein, werewolves and phantoms, who will reappear with great regilarity throughout the text.http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/michie1.html

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She goes by the name of “My Old Hell Freezes Over Friend” (MOHFOF) in my top sekrit online journal, to which a few of you are privy. The wench is dead now, and I am in another country. I feel I can put my real name to this story. If not hers. Call her Camille.

She was the debutante daughter of Oklahoma oil money. Big Daddy beat her practically every day of her life. She had a lip on her. He beat her the day her mother died. He beat her the day she was diagnosed with polio. Two or three survivor strategies: Lip. She sexualized herself fully. By age three, orgasm was a daily means of embodying herself. Cutting was to come later. Disembodying worked too. Dissociative identity disorder ended most of her friendships. As she put it, “I get mail addressed to other people.”

She married a physician and became a drug addict, not an uncommon career path for well-bred junkie girls. He’s the one who told her that in med school, the breasts of cadavers were cut off and thrown away as spurious tissue.

She got rid of him. She did have a lip on her. Toward the end of her run, some artistic Bohemian pimp boyfriend suggested she turn tricks to support her habit. How hip was that?

She got loaded and went out, somewhere around the Washington Monument, as I now picture it. She managed to hustle her way into a guy’s car. After a brief conversation, he said “You’re not really cut out for this, are you?”

It might have been the deep-set shadow of her eyes, the way the light gleamed through her pale blue irises, but she always looked as if her eyes were filling with tears. Princess Charlene of Monaco and her children have the same eyes.

I like to believe it was that which made him even a little gentle. Maybe her eyes were filled with tears.

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The paleo diet first came to my attention in the Tweet of Geoffrey Miller, the professor who says fat people are too lazy and fat to earn PhDs. I quickly found myself in an online pro paleo forum in which, as in many online mosh pits, young women (no old ones except me ventured where angels feared to tread) were being stomped, regularly, as the paleo diet was clearly the perquisite of digital oligarch males.
The cherry on that narrative arc was the controversy over a recent Craigslist want ad by San Francisco toolies for a paleo chef/slave/office serf.https://web.archive.org/web/20140612213421/http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/ofc/4512279091.html
I’ve always had lots of problems with it, aside from the fact it seems to be the new men’s rights movement diet. In the blue zones, where people today live to be 100 years old as a matter of course, meat is the one significant thing absent from their very diverse diets. Legumes, dairy or grains sustain the centenarians in Okinawa, Sardinia, Loma Linda CA, Costa Rica and Ikaria with the Loma Lindans being vegetarians by religious scruple. Each obviously adds regional specialties to the diet — cloudy red wine rich with anti-oxidants, green tea, lime-slaked tortillas, tomatoes, oranges, olive oil — but meat is mostly off the menu for the oldest healthy people on the planet.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone
The second big reason is that the paleo diet is for rich people, and grass fed beef is unsustainable. This new piece on the rise of paleo in the New Yorker reminds us of what major food sustainability research has been saying for 20 years — beef is not sustainable. Something the healthy, but significantly not wealthy, centenarians have known for millenia.
“Pound for pound, beef production demands at least ten times as much water as wheat production, and, calorie for calorie, it demands almost twenty times as much energy. Livestock are major sources of greenhouse-gas emissions, not just because of the fuel it takes to raise them but also because they do things like belch out methane and produce lots of shit, which in turn produces lots of nitrous oxide.”http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/28/stone-soup
My observation is that Peter Pan guys who grew up eating Slim Jims and cereal for dinner have found something to do with their money. Paleo.
Here is the classic piece by Candace Bushnell, one of her original Sex and the City pieces, about the most profoundly unsexy men of all. The paleo boys.http://observer.com/2007/07/what-has-two-wheels-wears-seersucker-and-makes-a-sucker-of-me-a-bicycle-boy/

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Okay, fashionistas and fatshionistas, here’s my dilemma. I’ve been looking for office clothes with difficulty for over 40 years. What it is now is almost what it was then: basically men’s wear cut for women. Jackets. I’ve had short sleeved batik ones over sundresses, I’ve had khaki jumpsuits, zippered flight type jackets in Prince of Wales plaid (with matching bell bottoms, to be sure), long-sleeved midi length washable poly velvet Jane Avril dress for those parties I had to cover, you name it. One of my favorites was a hip academic outfit confected for a conference in Ireland: widewale corduroy leggings in eau de Nil, gigantic white cashmere sweater, knee length Wellingtons, and pink pearls. No nipples. And, after 25, no minis.

What it is now is what all the serious girls at the uni around the corner from where I used to live wore and wear: techno fiber pants (black, black or black), $100+ V-necked t shirt (dark, dark, dark or jewel), jacket (“), Rolex and ankle boots. My t shirts cost $9, my big black face Timex $30, and I can’t get my freakishly high arches into boots. No jewelry. Although my discovery of $8 necklaces at Forever21 is a big monkey wrench in my Afro Pomo Homo minimalist femme costume. Don’t forget the hair *cut* not a hair *do*.

(I think perhaps not. One of the secrets of dressing the ancient avoirdupois is to let your wrinkles and your hair cut be the jewels.)

I am very interested in fashion and the cutting edge of future fashion, which as everybody knows is coming out of art schools in Britain, headed up by the late Alexander McQueen, with punk and artisanal references. He had some other references in there, also sublime. Part of the punk thing is sustainable, locavore, dumpster-diving, upcycled fashion, in which I am extremely interested. As we all know, street fashion drives couture. One of the biggest influences in street fashion since, I think, the Pointer Sisters started raiding the Good Will Stores of ’60s San Francisco for ’40s suits and ’30s panne velvet, is the Good Will. Now monetized by bottom feeder Hollywood stylists into “vintage” clothes, Good Will outfits worn by chic club kids have been fashion’s — and couture’s — leading influence. (All those chicken hawks like Lagerfeld and Galliano circle, cawing, over kids’ nightclubs.)

I think the tailored recycling of good old clothes is because there were no throwaway clothes in those days, and also because fabric was rationed. I was born close enough to those times to have worn clothes made by seamstresses. I miss them, and I am stunned by the Harajuku ho tutus all those straight edge designers are making out of shitty old concert t shirts. Where are the upcycled work clothes?

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I live for tea sandwiches. I troll the menus of fancy hotels for tea sandwich ideas, which are strangely few and far between. As mentioned, the best big honkin’ sammie ideas evar came from Chicago’s Cafe Lula, and Alice’s Tea Cup in NY (Lula’s Tineka sammie — peanut butter, sambal, sweet soy sauce, vine ripe tomato, red onion, cuke, whole grain; Alice’s Tea Cup — cumin-roasted carrots, tapenade, goat cheese on sesame semolina). The one takes a day’s shopping and the other a day’s cooking and another day to wash the dishes, but they are ROLL YOUR EYES BACK good. Alai Nna, who learned to cook in NOLA, with Vietnamese touches, is the best sandwich imagineer ever. I think she might find these a little heavy, both in concept and with the hippie dippie bread.
This one, from a five star British hotel I cannot now name, fits way more easily into the Dolce Far Niente summer cooking style: Pickled onion cream cheese, cukes, cress on — what have you. A nice challah toast, I’m thinking.
Slice a cup of red onion very thinly. Put it in a microwave bowl. Cover with red wine vinegar and pickling spice. Nuke. Cool. When they’re sufficiently pickled (I waited a couple days), take a well-drained handful (2/3 cup) and add to food processor with a bar of Neufchatel, some pepper and salt. Blend. It’s pink. It’s awesome. It’s ONION DIP, people. without the frightening sodium content of the Lipton’s kind. Total prep time, possibly five minutes, and five minutes to wash the processor. Lick first.

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So, about the crisis of confidence in the Albuquerque police department. A roundup to settle my thoughts.

1.I am wondering if the peace officer who has charged David Correia with assault at the sit in at the mayor’s office is Chris Romero, the officer seen manhandling Correia in this video, and possibly the same Chris Romero dismissed from, but present at, an absolutely Soviet case of police harassment detailed by Joline Gutierrez Krueger. There appear to be at least two Chris Romero police officers in Albuquerque.Video and screen caps of Correia’s take down by Chris Romero at the mayor’s office:

2.I am interested in the proposals by a retired policeman, Joe Byers, for the reform of the police department. It takes courage and love to come forward, and I’m glad he did. I want protesters to work on putting together a group of Joe Byers and his colleagues, as many as possible, to work together for plausible and real reform.

3.As beady-eyed as I feel about David Correia, he makes the perfect points in Mayor Berry’s oddly stoned, bubble boy response to the APD crisis — hiring dubious interlocutors, setting up toothless police complaint commissions. The idea that a photo op kind of charrette is reparation, rather than a.) PR control, b.) nut-cutting co-optation, c.) surveillance of citizens by notably violent and paranoid cops and d.) a veritably Dickensian Office of Circumlocution, is firmly planted in Berry’s mind as a form of proactive governance.* It’s not. Correia’s “press release” (um, no, it’s a polemic, although a good one; fighting spin with “press releases” strikes me as vying for the spotlight) on the topic of Berry’s spurious police complaint commissions is here. (If this is a movement and not a personal crusade, the good points about the police complaint commissions should have issued from protest HQ, not by the professor personally.)

It seems to me both officers are performing for the camera. The audio of the Chavez shooting has the cop repeatedly saying I do not want to shoot you as he prepares and signals his intent to do so. Officer Padilla appears to discover a joint invisible to the camera, but pointedly described by Padilla — Is this a joint here?.

I think this is obvious to anyone who listens to or watches the (disturbing) tapes.

_____________

*I have to add, given, for example, Dinah Vargas and others’ detailed accounts of harassment by the APD as activists against excessive force, that community participation in police complaint boards is going to be minimal. The account in the Krueger column of the torture of a citizen by four police thugs at night is reason number one why no citizen with a real complaint against the police would ever show up and say anything to a police complaint board. Considering the fates of civil rights lawyer Mary Han, and Jerome Hall, shot dead six days after he won a police brutality suit against the APD, no sane person would show their face at one of the proposed police complaint commissions. You’d have to be crazy.

*The Four Gated City* is the only book I can think of, with Dickens right up there at the top, which actually gets down to what the virtue of money is. One of the protagonists is a rich schizophrenic. In those days the treatment was some lobotomizing drug like Lithium. The rich schizophrenic has the wherewithal to reject Lithium, go home to a safe and well-equipped basement apartment in the family home, in a safe neighborhood, with servants, and stay there, going over the walls with her fingertips, until the fearful tempest has passed. Martha Quest stays with her and takes care of her. In this way, the rich schizophrenic is not a vegetable all the time, but can continue with a life of the mind and maternal affections when she is not ill. That is the value of money — and it presumably exists in village or community life even when there is no money, and a superfluity of unmarried women at home, if not precisely servants. This scene speaks directly to one small political aspect of Foucault’s indictment of mental health practice — Lithium is brain police for the poor.

Lessing’s third great contribution to civilization was frankly telling it like it is about motherhood and abandoning her two little children, just as her mother had spent Lessing’s own childhood telling her what a burden it was. Yep.

Now the texts on this, as I’m sure you all know, are the three Scholz sisters’ memoir of their time on the cheering squad (’78-’85), and the Channelview, TX tale of tiger mom Wanda Holloway, who was convicted in 1991 of plotting a murder-for-hire of Verna Heath, the mother of Shanna Holloway’s greatest rival for the cheering squad, Amber Heath.

The Scholz sisters’ mama taught them how to dress, a terrifying process in which bags and shoes must match and hair must be high — a mean girls’ Texas aesthetic whose persistence can be sussed today by seeing Finglass in her orange sheath or the terrifying female VP of the Cowboys, Charlotte Jones Anderson (daughter of the owner), who looks like a ravening, Stanford-educated ferret in poufy little Prada dresses.

Mean girls doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Trammell was a DCC from ’80-’84, and Finglass from ’84-’89. I figure they’re both in their 50s, and I am always thinking about what makes an Old Babe and what Old Babes do and wear. I think Finglass is and Trammell isn’t. What made Finglass a babe — her smile — still makes her one today, as mean a pimp as she is. (For the smile, check out the GIF third from the top, left, for the pimpin’ watch CMT’s show.) Trammell’s hair — and you know that hair whippin’ energy takes the place of jiggle on the DCC — is the same do she was whippin’ in the ’80s, very long and prematurely blonde. Even the black girls on the squad have long whippy dos. I am trying to deconstruct the Trammell/Finglass eyeliner — completely surrounding the eye with a black line after 50 is an aesthetic choice of the kind I deemed some time ago, deciding to be an old woman who paints, with Louise Nevelson as the Old Babe Who Paints avatar. The paint becomes your face, instead of your face being your face.

Sculptor Louise Nevelson

Iris Apfel, who is the captain of the Old Babes team, sometimes paints and also is a polychrome old babe, one trope of how to dress as an Old Babe. Please note use of I.M. Pei glasses as eyeliner.

Here we see Apfel, painted, hustling her own line of MAC cosmetics. Note there is nothing natural about the colors, such that the paint once again becomes your face.

I am trying to deconstruct Trammell’s hair — it’s the 2013 version of her 1980’s do, which Finglass has most cleverly left behind. Her hair in the 80s was the biggest poufiest and poodly-est of all, and now it’s cool MILF hair. As Trammell’s is not. I have to think about it some more. I wonder if Trammell thinks of whippy hair as part of her dance costume?

Pedestrian Traffic Engineering PrinciplesHow the Mayor’s Path Through the Bosque Will Run Pedestrians Out, Increase the Crime Rate, and Complete the Ecocide We Started

A Surfaced Graded Trail Induces Travel

Traffic engineering formulas say for every 10 feet you widen a highway, you increase traffic by 3.3 percent.[i]

The Paseo del Bosque is a bicycle trail adjacent to the bosque. The mayor’s proposed 10-foot-wide graded and surfaced trail within the bosque falls under this traffic engineering rubric.

The city says 780 cyclists a day pass under I40 on the Paseo del Bosque. Three point three per cent of that is nearly 25 cyclists a day. So the minimum induced travel on the mayor’s proposed path would be 25 cyclists a day. Given a 12 hour day, that’s one cyclist traveling through the bosque every half hour.

A much more likely scenario is that half of the Paseo del Bosque cyclist traffic will use the mayor’s proposed path, for 390 cyclists a day. Given a 12-hour day, that works out to 32.5 cyclists per hour traveling through the bosque, about one every two minutes.

A reasonable scenario would be that the path doubles cyclist traffic adjacent to and within the bosque, such that 780 cyclists a day use the Paseo and 780 a day also use the inner bosque trail. Given a 12-hour day, that works out to 65 cyclists traveling through the bosque per hour, or just over one cyclist per minute.

2. Cyclists Run Pedestrians Out, No Pedestrians Increases Crime

The proposed 10-foot wide path, when shared, would be safe neither for pedestrians or cyclists.

Albuquerque has done a survey of conflicts between users of its many multi-use paths. This is what the then trails coordinator had to say on the international pedestrian engineering listserv, Pednet:

Here in Albuquerque, New Mexico we have over 80 miles of paved multi-use trails. The weekends are the worst times for user conflicts due to the varying speeds of users,i.e. rollerblaers and bicyclists vs. walkers and runners. The only solution is either separated paths or wider paths, say 14 feet. Otherwise it will forever be a problem.

We recently completed trail counts and surveys. 368 surveys were collected and many of the comments were “please make the trail wider and smoother”, and this was from rollerbladers and bicyclists. Most walkers and runners would actually prefer an unpaved surface, since it is easier on your hips, knees, and ankles vs. walking or running on concrete or asphalt.

This is obviously not a full blown study but I can assure you that the data

we’ve collected here over the past two weekends is indicative of the needs and conflicts which exist nationwide on trails whether they be in urban or more off-road/wilderness areas.

City transportation planner Julie Luna confirms this is the only study Albuquerque has made of conflicts between users of trails.

“Shy space” or “shy distance” is a term used by pedestrian traffic engineers to calculate safe widths for sidewalks, trails, and bicycle lanes. One fast-moving pedestrian such as a runner requires three feet of shy space. Give that runner a dog, who also requires three feet of shy space, and six feet of shy space are required for just two pedestrians.

On a 10-foot-wide trail such as the one the mayor proposes, that leaves four feet of shy space for one cyclist to pass the slower-moving pedestrians. Best practice traffic engineering principles for cyclists recommend six to eight feet of shy space for each one. Any trail through the bosque that would safely allow both cyclists and pedestrians to use it would need to be 12 feet wide at a minimum, or 14 feet wide as the Albuquerque trails coordinator suggested.

Crime increases as pedestrians decrease. Out of the line of sight of motorists, a cyclist-only bosque would harbor increased assaults under the well-documented public safety rubrics of “eyes on the street”. [iii]

A 14-foot-wide trail through the bosque would induce even more cyclist travel, decrease pedestrian travel, and increase crime.

3. Animals and Birds Flee Increased Human Contact

These statistics can best be calculated by the many professional naturalists who oppose the mayor’s path. Gale Garber of Hawks Aloft Inc. has scientifically surveyed bird life in the Rio Rancho bosque since so-called invasive plants which provide nesting habitat were removed, and a crusher fine trail installed. The reduction from over 700 summer birds per 100 acres to under 200 in just eight years cannot be accounted for by drought alone.

The minimum induced travel of one cyclist per half hour twelve hours a day – much less the maximum of one cyclist every minute – would have a permanent damaging effect on the safe nesting habitat of birds, mammals and reptiles in the bosque.

[iii]For “eyes on the street”, “shy space” and “barrier effect” outcomes, see the most recent best practices guide recommended by the experts at the international pedestrian traffic engineering listserv, Pednet: Pedestrian and Bicycle Planning: A Guide to Best Practices, Victoria (B.C.) Transport Policy Institute. Their director, Todd Litman, is thought by senior pedestrian traffic analysts to be among the most solid analysts now at work.